These people filling the market, grab them by the eye!
Provoke them and slap them with the bam bam of God’s song!
Here at this intersection, on the canvas reversed, on the field of war, in life Stopping the sun for a moment
– Bairāgī Kāinlā, “People Filling the Market”
IntellIgIBIlIty Play
according to Shyam Thapa (not his real name), it takes big eggs to work in the village. Shyam, a recent graduate of the naxal School for the Deaf, is well known for his sometimes crude but always creative wordplay. “eggs” here is an obvious metaphor for testicles, though, given the iconic character of the sign (wobbly round object), it is not clear that any detour away from the literal is even necessary. Then again, we were talking about the steely determination of a particular woman we both knew, so perhaps precise terminology was never really at stake here in any case. This woman, whom I’ll call Rina ghale, was about to return from several months of teaching nSl outside the Kathmandu Valley, and Shyam and I were talking—in his comfortable house, drinking cold
Orange Fanta, and watching soccer on tV—about why most deaf people are so reluctant to work in rural areas.
The problem of “centralization” is widely acknowledged in moments of self-reflection across all sectors of public service in nepal (lawoti 2005; gellner 2007), but the apprehensions that deaf people bring to the issue extend well beyond those held by the typical development industry bureaucrat. Though there is near-total agreement among deaf activists that spreading nSl to the countryside is the most urgent task facing the deaf political movement, volun-teering to do this work remains an act of remarkable self-sacrifice. even and especially among the great many signers who grew up in rural areas, it can be very hard to give up the amenities, relationships, and opportunities of deaf Kathmandu. This is not, in other words, just a question of urban habits and creature comforts; there is far more to miss in the countryside than Fanta and broadcast sports.
The simple reality is that being deaf outside of nepal’s few major cities can be a miserable experience, filled with indignity and isolation. Those who have escaped these circumstances are understandably reluctant to choose to return to them. as I was sometimes told and very frequently saw myself, the hearing can be decidedly unpleasant—patronizing at best and vicious at worst—to the deaf people they encounter (Prasad 2003). even those who mean well can be exhausting, as their deep naïveté about deaf lives builds a world of empty spaces that must be filled by activists with laborious explanations about even the most basic and obvious things. as one sign language teacher related to me, “When I go out to the village, I am working all the time. every moment. In every tiny little thing I do, everyone watches me, saying to each other things like, ‘Oh look, he likes to eat chicken. I wonder why?’” This pattern of hearing behavior is underwritten by a powerful and pervasive intuition that the deaf lack any kind of substantial interiority. The hearing project remarkably little content into the empty spaces of the deaf left by everything that cannot be seen directly. Unlike everyone else, the deaf are expected to be only and exactly as they appear, and this tacit anticipation of near-total absence within them often causes the revela-tion of even simple social facts to come as a surprise. It’s hard to imagine hearing people asking each other why they enjoy chicken, and yet in encounters with the deaf even this dullest of particularities seems to justify collaborative pub-lic notice. For many deaf professionals, these assumptions of emptiness loom as a reminder of harder times, and they compromise the technically demand-ing work that they are called to do in rural areas. In the economy of authority
that organizes nepal’s politics of development (Justice 1989; Shrestha 1997;
Hindman 2009), deaf experts are plagued by the perceived impossibility of deaf expertise.
The sad and difficult reality (sometimes acknowledged and sometimes de-nied by activists) is that linguistic isolation leaves many deaf individuals with exactly the kinds of deficits that the hearing world expects them all to have.
against these circumstances, it is unsurprising that activists have framed their project primarily around the problem of language. This is a strategic and aes-thetic decision simultaneously: if there is a single principle that unifies deaf activists in nepal, it is sign language. They like it. They want all deaf people to know it, and they want some hearing people to know it too. as far as an explicit content goes, the value of signing is probably the only uncontested tenet of deaf politics.1 and, to these ends, all the hard work is paying off. Despite having little institutional sanction in the hearing worlds of governance and power, the deaf have been remarkably effective in promoting their language: every year in nepal, the number of signers grows.
to expand the reach of sign language, deaf activists travel around nepal offering six-week to four-month courses in nSl to deaf people and their fami-lies. Over the last few decades, the structure, extent, and framing of these mis-sions have shifted significantly with funding cycles and political priorities, but the work itself has consistently articulated around what Bateson (1972) called a double-bind: when deaf teachers arrive in rural towns, they must be both deaf enough to claim access to those they seek to teach and yet undeaf enough to appear capable of doing so. They must, in other words, establish both their equivalence to and their separation from the indigenous deaf populations they encounter. critically, they must do all of this in sign language.
In the course of my fieldwork, I accompanied several of these expeditions outside of the Kathmandu Valley, and I visited several more that were already in progress. The work involved is undeniably arduous. after a period of train-ing, deaf teachers set off to their assigned regions with only what they can carry to last them through the duration of their mission. They stay in boarding houses or rented rooms, and they conduct daily classes with whomever they can persuade to show up. Ideally, they maintain separate classes for the deaf and for their hearing family members, though in practice it is generally quite 1. In this regard I follow green (2014), who writes persuasively that the entire scope
of communicative function is framed in deaf nepal as an ethical problem.
difficult to keep nondeaf participants motivated to attend regularly once the novelty of the program has worn off. Particularly over longer course periods, scheduled classes generally erode into private tutorials, compelling the visit-ing teachers to spend large parts of their day travelvisit-ing from house to house visiting families with deaf members. Though the program administrators back in the city sometimes lamented this breakdown of routine, veteran teachers recognized some benefits too. It is nice to have a class, but it is often even more valuable to have intimate access to the home lives of students. There, activists can function as social workers and role models as much as teachers. a significant part of the transformative effect these programs have, I believe, is a result simply of the visible presence of an educated and articulate deaf person in town. The fact of a deaf teacher making rounds every day serves this end splendidly.
One spring shortly before the start of the monsoon, I traveled to Rasuwa District with a deaf sign language teacher in his mid-twenties I’ll call niraj. He was accompanied by Rina (the young deaf woman mentioned at the beginning of this chapter) and a hearing interpreter the two had retained for the trip. after traveling four hours by bus and another four hours on foot, we stopped for lunch a short distance from the town square where niraj would work for the coming several months. Though the food would have been better an hour earlier along the road, the timing and position of our stop here were important. While Rina and I ate, niraj instructed the interpreter to go on ahead. She was to find the chairman of the local Village Development committee (VDc) and to seek his permission to operate in his town. In all reality, his blessing was probably not really necessary. For better and for worse, the stakes of deaf activism to non-deaf politics are generally low enough to draw very little attention (cf. Hankins 2009). nevertheless, niraj hoped the chairman would offer to organize a small gathering that evening in the town square. Sure enough, when the interpreter returned, she informed us that he had granted us his full endorsement and that he had called a town meeting so he could introduce us.
It was early evening when we finally arrived to a crowd of roughly sixty peo-ple, assembled in the dusty open space next to the town’s most prominent pīpal tree. This crowd included, I would later learn, five deaf people standing with their families, all of whom niraj hoped would learn nSl under his tutelage.
Before we arrived, niraj had instructed me to join the audience. There, I was to respond politely to anyone who addressed me, but I should not seek out con-versation. He and Rina, meanwhile, stood next to the VDc chairman without
talking, watching as the crowd first gathered and then became increasingly rest-less as time drew on.
niraj wore grey slacks and a clean but modest dress shirt. as fashion choices, these clothes seemed a nod to what Mark liechty (2003) has called an aesthetic of middleness—neither asian nor european and neither fashionable nor utili-tarian. This style of dress offered niraj a displacement to nowhere, a panglobal imagery that identifies with no place in particular and thus here as much as anywhere else. Rina, on the other hand, was styled in the bright colors, intricate embroidery, and contrastively arranged tight and draping lines exemplary of Kathmandu’s then latest kurta suruwal2 fashion. Dressing this way was a strong and burdensome choice. These clothes were completely inappropriate for walk-ing in the hills, and Rina complained to us about their bulk for the entire dura-tion of the trip. even in Kathmandu, she was not used to wearing quite so much fabric. as if to underscore her orientations to kinds of identity explicitly based elsewhere, Rina furthermore held her cell phone continually in her left hand and would occasionally manipulate its controls, this despite the fact that cellular coverage had not yet reached this part of the country. She was physically here, but her mode of comportment and self-presentation were organized entirely by connections to other places. The villagers could see the presence of these connections, but all particulars remained hidden by geographies and screens, untraceable and inscrutable for content. niraj meanwhile just stood, rocking on his heels and watching the crowd. He kept his hands in his pockets except to occasionally check his watch.
after a delay that might have been calculated to sit just on the safe side of rudeness, niraj and Rina stepped forward to occupy a more conspicuous position in the space. Then, Rina nodded to the interpreter, who informed the crowd that the program would begin after just five more minutes. This further wait was ostensibly designed to give any stragglers a chance to join the audience, though enough time had passed already that it was hard to imagine that anyone intending to come might realistically still be on his or her way. at that moment, however, Rina and niraj broke the rhythms of waiting by doing something very unexpected: they began to talk to each other in sign language. The effect was an implosive silence from the audience, sudden and complete. Though most people
2. a style of clothing consisting of pants and a short frock, popular among young urban women as an alternative to the lunghi skirts popular in the hills and the more formal saḍi identified with India.
present had seen and even used “home signs”3 to communicate with their deaf kin and neighbors, I suspect that few had ever seen two deaf people—let alone two well-dressed deaf people ascended from the city—communicating in sign with each other. The five deaf people in the crowd had perhaps signed with each other on occasion, though I suspected at the time and later confirmed that they had never been brought together to interact in any kind of sustained way. This is not unusual. They all lived twenty minutes or more away from the center of town in different directions, and in nepal there seems to be very little sense among the hearing that deaf people might enjoy or benefit from interacting with each other. as one father of a deaf teenager put it to me, “What would they say to each other?” as a general rule, people with disabilities are kept close to home, and women especially tend to have few opportunities for social engage-ment beyond their immediate household. nevertheless, the deaf people present had been brought together on that day because (I later learned) the VDc chair-man had implied that niraj might help them to access the disability entitle-ments promised by law but only inconsistently dispersed.
after the designated five minutes had passed, Rina moved to the center of the impromptu stage and began to address the assembled crowd in sign.
The interpreter, ten feet away in Rina’s front left quadrant, dutifully proceeded to interpret her words. at first, the members of the audience seemed unsure of where to direct their gaze, shifting quickly back and forth between Rina and the interpreter. They were obviously unfamiliar with the conventions of interpreted speech, and consequently for them the event provided a conflicting set of cues: the sound of the interpreter’s voice demanded a certain extent of attention, but her gaze and demeanor were directed not at those listening to her but rather inward at Rina. Rina, meanwhile, faced out at the audience and moved through the most conspicuous parts of the space. I don’t know that the uncertainty ultimately resolved for everyone, but before long all eyes had set-tled on her. If nothing else, Rina was more visually interesting than the inter-preter, who furthermore could be heard without being seen. For the remainder of the program, the interpreter’s voice came from one place, but all bodies were 3. Though “home sign” is the term of choice in the sign language literature (Senghas 2004; Fusellier-Souza 2006; Brentari et al. 2012), I prefer e. Mara green’s
“local sign” designation (green 2012) because it casts the issue in terms of scopes of conventionality rather than domestic/public distinctions. nevertheless, I use the term “home sign” here because the phrase (in various translations and transliterations) was used occasionally by the deaf nepalis I spoke to.
focused—collectively and conspicuously—on Rina, someplace else. This effect of displacement is familiar to signers, and they often discussed it in my presence.
It must be very frustrating, many commented, for hearing people to never know for sure who is listening to them. How, they wondered, could anyone ever use spoken language discretely?
These considerations of voice and location aside, however, the content of Rina’s presentation was itself extremely familiar, built as it was from an only slightly modified version of the political speech genre that characterizes for-mal discourse in nepal generally (Hartford 2002; Onta 2006). Rina said that it was with great pleasure that she introduced her esteemed friend niraj to the respected village community, that she hoped its members would hear her words and reflect upon them, and that the well-being of the deaf was the responsibil-ity of us all. She ended her talk with a familiar rhetorical flourish, proclaiming that the development of nSl must be synonymous with the development of nepal. as far as political speeches go, there was nothing particularly unusual here save for two facts: first, it was being delivered by a deaf person, and deaf people don’t generally give speeches; second, and equally strange, it was being addressed to the five deaf people in the audience, and speeches aren’t generally addressed to the deaf. Meanwhile, these five, in addition to comprising only a very small minority of those assembled, understood neither spoken nepali nor conventional nSl, and as a consequence they gleaned little to nothing of the speech’s content. nevertheless, Rina addressed them as brothers and sisters, far less formally than she addressed others, and she accompanied these identifica-tions with arms outstretched in their direction. at these moments, the deaf visibly acknowledged they were being spoken to, though they seemed distinctly cautious about the sudden appearance of an outsider who could sign.
The effect on the hearing audience members was equally complex but less obvious, organized by the confluence of several simultaneous and often con-flicting extents of Rina’s intelligibility. chief among these was the transparency of language. nobody could understand Rina’s signing. It was fast, it was out of sync with the interpreter, and—most importantly—it was in an especially standards-oriented register of nSl. none of the locals had ever learned nSl, but it was nevertheless a surprise to most present that Rina’s obvious fluency should manifest so opaquely. Several members of the audience raised this point explicitly to me after the presentation had finished. In the words of one man,
“I’ve never seen anything like that. The language in her hands was so gentle and nice. I liked it. I couldn’t understand anything.” This irony of too-transparent
signing was not lost in the slightest on Rina. as she later explained to me, “Most people only know ‘natural’ signs, and they think that’s what nSl is. When they see signing that they can’t understand, they believe it’s just empty hand waving.”
Under more normal circumstances, in other words, deaf opacity suggests an in-coherence, one that serves as evidence of deaf minds as vessels filled with more noise than sense. as an exponent of deaf speech, then, Rina, through her own opacity, risked objectification in these terms, and yet other facts of her identity diverted this pattern of uptake. Rina is conspicuously rich, well dressed, and in full command of a hearing employee. She is, ultimately, too obviously well positioned within familiar regimes of power to be easily dismissed as a noisy hand-waving lāṭo.
as for the interpreter, the audience understood her better, but perhaps
as for the interpreter, the audience understood her better, but perhaps